


A Thief in the Night

by nerdzeword



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, people steal things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 20:11:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5839363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdzeword/pseuds/nerdzeword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What should have been a standard heist becomes so much more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thief in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> So I was reading this book, and the two main characters reminded me a lot of Draco and Hermione so I decided to write a fic about it. It was originally going to be a non magical AU but then I remembered one of Colubrina's fics and thought I'd make it an AU similar to that. 
> 
> Thanks much to my lovely beta again. You're the best dear.

A petite girl in her late teens, dressed entirely in black, slipped through the window of the old manor with ease. She wondered how the owners of the house didn’t even have any alarms and settled into just thinking of them as pretentious fools. Once inside, however, she took her time wandering through the house, almost as if she were in some sort of museum. If anyone were to stumble across her, they would think that she were simply a young guest of the resident family, such was the ease that she exhibited as she wandered the halls.

She pondered as she walked while the very walls seemed to stare at her threateningly. She glared back. Out of the corners of her eyes she thought she saw the paintings move, but when she turned to look, they were still. She thought she might have heard a chorus of frantic whispers coming from behind her, but they were faint and fizzled out as she concentrated on them, so she paid them no heed.  

The girl found the fancy ‘receiving wing’ of the house and started opening doors, looking for anything of interest. She wandered through parlors, casually fingering anything that striked her fancy with gloved hands and a keen eye. She snorted when she picked up a faberge egg off of the mantel of the fireplace in one of the rooms and discovered it to be a rather cunning replica of one of the Imperial Eggs that were presented to Tzar Nicholas the II. She doubted that anyone other than her, who had spent an entire semester of her first year of secondary school, researching the eggs, among other Russian art from before the Revolution, would have noticed. She moved on with her search.

While much of what she found was fascinating enough, none of the little doodads she found interested her enough to bother taking them from their proper places. She even took the time to wipe the smudges off of a ceramic elephant on a shelf of one of the parlors. Why did anyone need this many parlors and sitting rooms anyway?

She meandered into another wing of the house and thought that she must be close to where the family actually lived as the carpeting was a bit more worn, and the hallways a bit less constricting. She was more careful in opening doors after learning this, stopping before each door to see if she could sense people on the other side. Finding no one, she travelled through two more rooms before she found one that truly caught her interest.

The girl smiled at the extensive library, wandering through the dozens of shelves in something very near bliss. She looked at the titles as she traced her fingers across the rows of books, beginning to see a surprising trend. Most of the books seemed to be either personal journals written by, she discovered after perusing a few, various members of the Malfoy family, or magic books. Well at least she knew who she was stealing from now then, she thought with disinterest, choosing to focus further on the books of magic. She found her gaze resting on a title that looked to be a bit more promising.

“Standard Book of Spells Year One” She read aloud, pulling the book from its shelf and flipping it open to a random page.

“Wingardium Leviosa. The levitation spell, incantation should be accompanied by a wand gesture” She studied the diagram and noticed a bit of writing on the side. “Swish and flick.” She looked at it again in more puzzlement. Then she noticed another set of notes.

“Levi- _o_ -sa not Levio-sa,” she muttered the word under her a breath a few times until she was sure she had it right, then pointed her finger at one of the books laying on the seatee across the room.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” she annunciated. The book floated into the air with ease. “That was way easier than usual,” she said as she twirled the book in the air above her head in awe. She looked back at the book. She would take this one for now, but she would be back. She was sure of it.

 

~One Week Later~

 

She had finished the book in only two days and had moved on to the second year book, and then the third. As soon as she had realized that the house was as magical as she was, she had found that the whispers she had heard in the hallways were those of the portraits. She had taken to chatting idly with the ones she past on her way in and out of the manor. She was constantly meeting new ones, as they shoved themselves into one another’s frames to investigate her each time she climbed through her second story window.

The more time she spent in the manor, the more she found it opened up to her and the more she found she didn’t want to leave. The walls that had seemed so threatening that first night now seemed warm and friendly. She waved to Alabaster Malfoy and his wife Lorinda, who waved back with sunny smiles; and gave her brightest smile to Cygnus Malfoy the First, who still pretended to hate her.  

The girl finally made it to the library, which she had officially dubbed ‘her room.’ and dropped her book bag on the floor. She should really study some as she had University approaching in the fall and she wasn’t going to be able to slack off in the History track at Oxford. Not in the least.

But her newfound ease with her magic was intoxicating. Sure, she had always been capable of doing the things she read about in her books, but the spells and incantations that went with them made everything so much _easier._ It was like riding a bike. Doing it is the hard part, doing it with no hands just takes a bit practice.

She flopped into the nearest armchair and pulled out the Grade Four spell book. this was where they got to the good stuff she supposed. All of the spells in this one seemed to be a bit less light hearted and more useful in a fight. It seemed a bit silly to her really, a world of magic at your fingertips, one could do anything they wanted (so long as they followed Gamp’s laws, which she had read about in one of the other books she had perused) With all of that power, why would anyone want to bother fighting, when you could be travelling the world or curing cancer?

She was broken out of her reverie by a voice.

“Why are you so interested in those beginner spellbooks anyway? You can do wandless magic, you ought to be capable of some of the harder spells.”

She looked up to see a boy, approximately her own age, leaning against the bookcase. He looked like some sort of angel, lit as he was by the light of her little fairy lights. His soft blond hair fell into his face, reaching to just past his eyebrows in a shaggy fringe, his eyes sparkled silver when they caught the light. the only thing that marred the image was his rumpled pajamas. All she could think to say was, “Your Imperial Faberge Egg is a fake,” which seemed like an awfully silly thing to bring up in retrospect, but then again, she had never been caught before.

He shrugged. “It’s my mother’s. Even if she knows it’s fake, I doubt she cares, so long as it matches the furniture.” She noticed the almost bitter tone in his voice. He moved into her light and took the chair across from hers. In the brighter light he looked human again, and she found herself relaxing, ever so slightly.

“So what’s it like, living as a muggle?”

“A what?”

“Non magical person.”

“There’s a term for it?”

“Yes. Now answer the question.”

“Wait. Does that mean there are more of us? People like me, and like your family? I mean I assumed there was since _someone_ had to write all of these books, but I never really considered-”

He gave a sigh. “Yes. There are entire villages of witches and wizards, and an entire wizarding town right in the center of London. You really don’t know anything do you?”

She shook her head slowly.b“I thought I was the only one.” She fought back tears, whether they were of relief, or of frustration and bitterness, she didn’t know, but she found herself pouring her heart out to this boy who was somehow like her.

“It was scary at first, being the only one who could… do things. But I got better. I learned how to control it and how to make the magic work for me, if only a little. I thought that maybe- maybe it wasn’t such a curse after all. Maybe it just meant I was special. But then I found this place.” she gestured to the room around her. “And I realized that I’m not all that special after all.”

The boy looked as if he might even understand, if only just a little.

 “There’s a school, a school where people like us learn how to use magic. It’s called Hogwarts and I was supposed to be the best person there. I had always been told it was my birthright, ‘you’re one of the sacred 28 Draco, you have to do well on your OWLs. You have to get invited to Professor Slughorn’s Christmas party. Don’t forget to be perfect Draco’” His mocking tone was laced with layers of bitterness. “I was supposed to be special, I was supposed to rule the castle and all of the students were supposed to look up to me as their leader. It was my right as a Malfoy.

“But then Harry Fucking Potter just had to be in my year and all of the sudden I had nothing.” He gazed at her with a sort of desperation in his eyes. “Money and a family name gets you nowhere when you have nothing else worth giving. If you took away my money and name, I was nothing and no one compared to ‘The Boy Who Lived’ and ‘The Chosen One.’ I mean I was the top of the class, but who wants to be remembered for that? I never wanted to be just another name on the roster.”

She didn’t understand who Harry Potter was or what made him special, but she did understand what it felt like to _know_ you were superior, but be treated like less of a person anyway. She took a sharp breath. not quite used to the camaraderie.

“They always laughed at me in school. Called me the bookworm, and the freak. Sometimes I would believe them, but others… I just want to make a difference in the world. I want to be one of those people you read about in the history textbooks, or in fairy tales. And I thought to myself, ‘They don’t know what I can do.’ I can be anything I want, I’m special and powerful and nothing they say can change that.”

“Is that why you break into people’s houses?” He looked genuinely curious. She shook her head.

“No. I do that for the challenge.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

“I break in for the challenge. I steal art for the power. I take back art that was stolen from its original owners and return it. If the owners are no longer living, I anonymously donate it to a museum. A sort of modern day Robin Hood, if you will.”

 He nodded thoughtfully. “It must be so easy to be powerful in a world where no one shares your power,” he commented.

She cocked her head and stared at him. “I suppose it is.”

“My parents come back tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

“They’re not a fan of muggles.”

“Oh,” she said again, already mourning the loss of her library.

“What if I came with you? To the muggle world.”

She looked at him curiously. “I imagine you’d be rather confused by a lot of things if you did,” she stated.

“I imagine I would.”

“So why?”

“I’m a fast learner.”

“So?”

“So, we’ll be the only two special people in that world. Between you and me, we’ll be unstoppable.”

 She didn’t answer him, just fixed him with her steady gaze.

“Think about it, I teach you how to get by in the wizarding world, and help you learn those spells, and you can teach me everything there is to know about the Muggle world. We can be your Robin Hood, or we can cure some muggle disease or find buried treasure. And no one but us ever has to know that we’re not the only special ones in the world.”

She sent all of the books flying back to their proper places on the shelves and stood up, bag in hand. Odd, she thought, this would be the first time she had ever stolen a person.

“This will be hard,” she warned him.

He shrugged and gave her a cocky smirk. “Bring it on.”

“Well then, ‘Draco Malfoy’ Onward Ho! as they say.”

“What’s your name? Oh partner in crime?”

He stood to join her, random objects flying towards him from what looked like all parts of the house and settling themselves into a duffle bag that was most definitely not big enough to hold it all.

“Hermione. Hermione Granger.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm thinking of continuing it, but let me know what you guys think.


End file.
